Howl Softly: A Revelatory Compilation of Words

HOWL

SOFTLY

A REVELATORY COMPILATION OF WORDS

Milicent G. Tycko

AuthorHouse™

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Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2013 by Milicent G. Tycko. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/27/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-2274-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-2273-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013903872

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter l

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

About The Author

Milicent is an 85 year old author who for decades has used writing as a form of self-expression and now wants to share this with others. The challenge for the reader is to find the poems, essays and stories which are a circuitous skeleton within the overall compilation and thus create an image of the author’s make-up.

My Name is Norma This Time

She frequently sat in her room at her desk, and stared disquietly at the wire shelves against the wall that held boxes of papers and also big notebooks and plastic bags filled with materials and sewing equipment. This was her savings from many years of writing, sewing, collecting discs and photos. It happened to her quite often of late, because her senior age and health anxieties preyed upon her thoughts and she tried to find some way of gathering up her years in some kind of subsuming abstraction. The wire bookshelves tempted her to keep stuffing things into their airy shelves, now four stacks high and three columns wide. Easy to dust now and then and easy to view from many angles, which was her preference over wooden shelves which would hide dust and things behind the books.

The organizing instinct was flimsy and when she also saw some embroidered pillows she made years ago and some sun hats stashed in a Lacquered Box atop the top shelf, she did not resist spending time being amused and recalling when these items were in her life. The distraction of the cardboard box of woolen and cotton squares destined to be a patchwork quilt someday and the threads and needles and various size scissors all added to her hopelessness. Organizing was impossible, and she tried to find some tail of a thread to help her start becoming persistently abstract and able to scorn the difficulties presented by multi-colored, multi-sized, multi-thought writings, multi-finished projects and it was a seemingly hopeless patchwork quilt for her. She threatened herself almost audibly that if she did not focus on organizing, then some day not very far down the road the task would fall to others, who could never understand and treasure these deposits of her long life.

She stared at the wire shelf that held old family photos, genealogy stories of great-grandparents down to grandchildren and knew that probably this would be tossed out as irrelevant and burdensome by whoever was cleaning out. Heavy notebooks were antiquated and the children’s children could easily and deftly get any information they wanted with a few clicks on their hand held computer devices. Actually she admitted that when she was younger, decades ago, her interests were in the vivid present and not in the history of where this all came from, back in Eastern Europe in centuries past. Only when she was finished with her motherhood responsibilities did she have the time and curiosity and patience to look up and record this personal history.

Her aging arms could still enfold this shelf of family history, but then the grasped contents must be put into a fairly big box. And this would be only one big box for starters. Norma would not give up now however, because some semblance of order was at least focused upon.

For all the endless writing that she enjoyed over many years, she knew that organizing had to be difficult. There was a dim suggestion of some starting thread, as she remembered the stories she knew about Maureen or Fluffy or Vivian alias Ida, or Who Am I Anyhow, or others that she she liked reading and a story by Fluffy in which she talked of an old aunt who always likened her to Norma Shearer, the famous actress of years ago. The times when we all watched black and white movies and doted upon the actors and actresses whose time in the limelight coincided with the first NY worlds fair. The world’s fair that had as unforgettable icons, the Trylon and the Perisphere, outlined emphatically against the NY sky.

That slight thread was helpful to Norma now, and was enormously flattering. Fluffy’s way of weaving some hurts artistically for comfort gave Norma the slim thread of awakening again to organizing things.

Norma now had the brilliant incentive to find those old stories, which were so distant from her now, and seemed like only Bits and Pieces stored away in a golden Lacquered Box, just as now she could gaze up to the lacquered box and find her sun hats, pink ones, light blue checked ones, large lidded straw ones. The lacquered box rested next to a super large book about the art quilt, which was from those years that her fingers were deft enough to hand-make several quilts which were displayed up in a New England quilting store in the town near where she had gone camping for many summers on the big lake.

Norma knew that in three by four wire shelves there were encapsulated personal memories. Not so in the wooden shelved bookcase on her opposite wall, which held about ninety of her favorite books that she read and re-read over the years. This reminded her of the story she once wrote about loving real leather or even ersatz bound paper books, old and worn and yellowed and missing sharp corners, rather than digitized versions found nowadays on computer devices so quickly. As was her wont, she had titled it Wandering in Books.

The sensation of the real book propped up on the kitchen table or elsewhere on a bed pillow or train seat but always ear-marked and available was still there for her so then Norma realized that all the different kinds of shelves were actually bound together and that this organizing effort of hers was becoming just one more unfathomably large new book which could not resist being written. Now it all seemed easier to accomplish and much less flimsy, so she was open to dwelling on the images she had enjoyed when outside on her back porch this morning, where the pink and white and red and yellow zinnias she had planted in early Spring were now being visited by many butterflies which dazzled her eyes as she sat there with another book in her hands and a cup of coffee on the little table next to her chair there.

She was reading a heavy book of Jack London stories, several of his novels and fifteen of his short stories, and the below twenty degree dark nights up in Alaska where the deep snow was perpetually crusted over, did make comforting hot summer reading. She would desert this book once Winter came to her outdoors, of course. His wonderful insights and des—criptions of dogs and wolves and hunters were very engrossing. And again, with the usual ups and downs, the recent rise in the price of gold made his stories about the gold rush up in Alaska seem more valuable than ever and his stories should rise in interest as the price of this relatively rare metal soars, she mused to herself.

Next to that new book was the thick maroon leather covered old well worn book of poetry, that was her never to be parted with favorite, the one which opened up her view of literature when she had innocently started college sixty-five years ago.

Those supposedly modern poets were almost forgotten now and were displaced by so many other writers, but Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooks and A. E. Houseman and Thomas Hardy wrote about her own childhood era when the world wars devastated the world. Amazing that their words were so applicable and cogently near to the present events, and as they often wrote, time is forever.

Norma stuck to her bold decision, that she would just include everything with words into her ultra big book, and she recalled that one of her writings was about a woman who tried to write a novel and gradually realized what experiences were part of the plot of her novel. Norma would look for all those pages which were no doubt stashed away someplace on the wire shelves. That aspiring woman was named Maureen. She should be given her due soon, mused Norma.

Norma would do this. She was a free person, yes? She could bind together her words in any way that suited, or disturbed, or confused, or pleased herself and thus having her name suggested by her long lashes and gentle disposition and slowly changing face according to moods, as suggested by her beloved aunt of yore, became for her a thread which could weave in and out and stitch tightly or stitch loosely and select fabrics of any colors or textures that haunted her at the moment and make a quilt that could be changed and scissored out and stitched together again in any theme or pattern. Norma the courageous one. Norma who came from a genealogically interesting, to her at least, family, with an admiring aunt that Fluffy had once mentioned.

The parts of books she had read that particularly interested her, were always the introductions, prefaces and critical biographies of the life and style of the authors, and she knew that there were more than infinite critical views of the times, the styles, the upbringing, the eras which enabled writing authors to exist. The backgrounds and views of the writers always were first on her list of where to turn to in a book she just picked up.

She allowed herself to feel good because she would not have to use a chisel and stone to imprint or invent an alphabet. Even her great-great grandparents who were thought of frequently in her genealogy research, were not burdened by carving into stone. They even had bibles printed with ink on paper, and more beautifully decorated than most current mass produced bibles were. She was blessed by the modern device of using flash drives to add chunks of words to her huge treatise. She could shorten or lengthen or modify or insert reactions into all the stuff. Maybe she could call the final enterprise: Norma’s Stuffed Cabbage. Maybe not.

Seems to her that the male authors were of immediate impression in her memories of beloved books. With a bit of feminist guilt she also included beloved female authors, such as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, George Sand, Emily Dickinson and on and on. The writing of history had changed once a female writer dared to describe the reign of Henry VIII, and the story that Norma wrote about Wolf Hall highlights this change. When Norma had initially picked up this heavy book titled Wolf Hall she expected to be treated to another Jack London story, like The Call of the Wild, the lives of wolves in the frozen North. Not so.

Wolf Hall had given her a complex history of King Henry VIII, certainly a much-relied upon gentleman, deservedly or not many centuries ago.

Agnes Strickland was the first woman who ventured to write a biography of King Henry VIII, a subject which before was only the province of male authors. Although she lived in the Victorian age and was of course writing from the point of view of that era, and the limitations of not knowing the future, her complex explorations led the way for a a long series of other woman historians, writing not just about the lives of female notables, but venturing to write, and very comprehensively and from a broader point of view, about male notables. This Wolf Hall was in this stream. Norma asserted herself also, being a woman, and so she would be fearless and put her own long tirade about King Henry VIII again into one of her Afterwards. She reserved her right to decide much later on as to which Afterward would be thus treated.

Norma’s list of the male authors was more endless and forceful in her preferences, because she still felt the need to rely. At her age the feminist movement came late to her, and met with huge emotional disapproval although coupled with a bit of sympathetic understanding. Where would she be, or would she even be, if her grandmothers were not hugely strong and dedicated mothers in the fullest sense. She learned more about them when she had done her genealogy research, however she was fortunate to really know them both when she was a young child. Her Bubba from the Ukraine had often visited, and she recalled her drinking her tea from a saucer, and, best of all, how Bubba would sit close and pat and rub Norma’s little back while mumbling Yiddish songs. Norma was sad that Bubba was packed into steerage with her six surviving children as they sailed to Ellis Island in New York in early 1900s. No fresh air, little food or water, lots of companionship however with tons of other hopeful people. The thought of reaching Ellis Island gave them all the hope they needed. But Bubba passed away when Norma was just five years old. Her other grandmother, Minnie, from Austria, was with her until she was over ten years old, and Norma was often staying with these grandparents, Minnie and Adolf, in their simple, old-fashioned large front—porched country home up the Hudson in Kerhonkson.

They had sailed even earlier in 1900 from Austro-Hungary and settled with their four children in New Jersey at first. Two more daughters were proudly born to them in this country. One was Norma’s own mother.Then they were attracted to the small farm village up the Hudson River. She remembered that Minnie, who spoke German, Hungarian, Jewish, was now trying to learn perfect English, and that Norma helped her with her exercises on the lined homework pad, a stenographer type booklet. Minnie who mothered six children was now helping with the mothering of the grandkids, who loved watching her put up sealed jars of fruits and vegetables for winter in the cold basement and ironing clothes by keeping the non-electric irons warm on the burners of her coal fired cooking stove, which always worked well doing its main job of cooking delicious meals. Best of all was walking to the small village stores nearby to do weekly shopping with grandma, who let her pick out creamy oriole cookies from the glass covered jars that lined the counter, while grandma chatted about all the local village gossip with the store keepers. The village was barely one block long and everyone knew everyone else there. They gathered to shop and chat and then go home to their farms and big acres of trees and plantings and domesticated animals. Norma was around ten years old when news of this grandmother’s death led to her crying all night long in spite of comforting words from the other adults in the family.

Norma is tired of all this thinking and wishes only to get outdoors now that the rains had ceased. She wanted to gaze at the flowers and shrubs and overgrown trees that formed her own hilly yard which was enveloped by greyish blue skies and vaporous clouds punctuated by lost seeming butterflies which flitted about. She was happy to watch her dog Princess fly quickly, up and down, in different parts of the big yard. All this resulted in erasing her urge to be an organizing self. Her words were relaxed as in a yoga pose, drifting beyond the control of a brain and gently prompted by ever changing feelings and partially conceived thoughts, an inward eye looking about for rhythm, spacing, lyrics, rhymes, pianissimos and fortes. Worthy only of scratches on a torn piece of paper, maybe an old receipt that had been left on the unswept porch. No lined paper, no pen, no modern invented devices such as mechanical computer buttons, just mumbled quiet words reflecting the random fluttering of the thin yet colorful butterfly wings that hovered tentatively over the flowers while hunting in indeterminate fashion for whatever pollen might perchance cling to their short-lived almost vaporous bodies. A scrap of paper giving her delight months later, when the stern, stark, persistent decision to organize again prevailed.

She wrote her yoga poem in that mood. She kept the scrap of paper with her little poem and oft looked at it when she became disturbed with the endless tasks she had set for herself. She stood up and practiced some of the relaxing poses her class for seniors had taught her. But this was not scheduled and many days went by with consternation not relaxation or meditation or whatever the weird yoga background music implied. She found the sounds of the sea more acceptable and easily loved.

She loved the sea which always aroused unusual thoughts when she gazed at its immensity. As she had once written in her long poem. Perimeters.

Yoga Poem

I sit on the ocean front sand

With legs crossed in my Yoga pose

Taking no space on the thin yellow strand,

Which soon darkens until

I reflect on the moonscape

Merged seamlessly still

With the seascape

Absorbing us placidly

All of my thoughts remain

Focused, as taught,

On my rhythm of breathing

My rhythm of slowness

Legato andante

Held steady for hours

As I watched the

Merged moonscape

Dissolve in the sea

And awakening light

Dimly peer before sun

Made the ripples of sea

Become evident telling me

Time was well spent

Rising up I depart

Norma was amazed that her earlier poem about the sea, the dramatic one with overtones about war, was so different from this self-absorbed Yoga poem that wistfully arouse when she was relaxed near the sands.

She was moved to re-read the earlier one now and emerge from the self-involvement of the Yoga poem, the self-involvement of practicing Yoga, which was so popular recently.

She read to herself. Her Perimeters brought back to her the sadness about war from the perspective of mothers who lost or feared the loss of their sons. The all embracing ocean tides and waves repeated the sadness.

Perimeters

A perimeter exists along the parrot’s wing

Up around the part that does attempt to sing

The throat that gabbles crumbs to caw

A sound remote, no matter for I saw

The line continue round the feathered form

Encasing all its puffy green and bright

Markings cleanly right before my sight

Exactly, and I felt perimeters proclaim

To be available upon the edge of all the sea

But breathless lines could not regain

Stability, the foam at beach’s shore

Though light and bubbly where it crept

Destroyed with ease and to the core

My concept

Of perimeters, it flowed in daring

Dashes toward the beach, the sea

So ruminating ceaselessly from deep

And tireless moans

With waves capped moonlit each

Seeking once again to draw perimeters

My eyes alight on pebbles moist

Trod upon by sea-wrens, gulls and mussel-heaps

All choked by weeds from sea and kelp

There stay the smoothened rocks

Certainly a line defines each stone

For one appears a tan and white elongate egg

Seen in border circumspect

Apart and hard, as you and I

Forget the sea, its surging and

Its openness

Waves flow

As separate stones lie on sand

In cool radiance almost

Cold

Their skins glow

From salt spray

Cast upon them

We took a break

In Greenport in the little store

Along the harbor side

There was a large straw basket

Filled with puffin toys of fake fur

Black and white with thickened beaks

Set upon the floor

Then we two stepped out

Escaping soap and candle smells

Into the real sea-cleared air

Where a seagull stood upon

The planks of wood there

Its grey and stiffened wings

Hardly ruffled in the spray

It hurt my eyes to my surprise

The sea

The bird unheard

The sea

Is roaring loudly

Why?

Its salty fingers permeate already

Bird

Why drown it out?

I say withdraw your

Tide

Cease your waves and listen

As your bird soars high

Its vessels vials of sea

That magically fly

The noisy sea condenses me

The rushing waves in series

Slap my mind

With thoughts disjointed like

The planks of wood and

Broken glass and floating rubber

Sent along the frothy edge of

Ocean’s pulse

Contrasting with those puffin toys

Within that tiny store for naught

My mind saw ships of boys afloat

Towards battles grim on foreign soil

Rushing ceaselessly to join

In gunny turmoil

While the planks of wood

And broken glass are swiftly sent

Along the frothy edge of

Ocean’s pulse

Pieces to be gathered up

And put along with broken cup

Upon a shelf by someone’s mama

Dreaming of her boys away

Afloat or landed

Worse on foreign strands

While overhead the seagull flies

And cries out clear

Its vessels vials

Of sea spray too

As are the calling ospreys

Where

As pebbles paired

In black and white

Lying moist upon the foreign strands

The mama’s boys are lying still

Sublime

Defined at last

Perimeters

1988

Layers of back and forth plans crowded out the dreaminess and distracting fixation on her different styles and concerns of her poems because she knew she would ultimately have to make the effort of seeking all the papers she had written when working on her genealogy project years ago. The family background had to be interwoven somehow. The hell with how large and cumbersome the boxes and within boxes like a Russian Doll the result became. Old yarn could be twisted tight and used to bind papers. Plenty of old varied colored yarn and delicately smooth silky yarn and worn out vividly colored ribbons were stashed away someplace on those airy wire shelves. Now a new purpose for their existence as she decided to pursue the background of her own existence. Deft quilt sewing fingers were no longer necessary. Plenty of literary critics could endlessly write about the motivations and means of expression and perhaps allusions and deeply hidden id emotions of her words that might eventually give publishers a use for their stacks of paper.

Her summaries of the researched facts of her maternal and paternal forefathers looked more interesting to her at this re-reading, when new perspectives flashed upon her original choices. She had more leisure now

to meditate upon all this, and was very pleased that she had written a summary of her genealogical research many years ago. It was great reading.

The drifting words Norma used when sitting out on her backyard porch and lightly scribbling her yoga words on a scrap of paper could also be included when she became strict and stark into the full notebooks of what she called Poems. The hell with trying to interpret the timing of these various poems. Let the vaporous butterfly wings expand to envelope huge piles of her engraved words. Let it all speak for itself. Let the buyer beware.

She forcefully challenged any distaste for this idea. She was determined to affix all the poems without again sorting and editing and classifying as to those about love, about loss, about scenery, about youth, about age, and so forth. About style, about length, about time of writing, and so forth. She agreed with herself once more. Let it all speak for itself. Not to overburden her rapidly ongoing story, she would have to just affix all these faceless poems at the very end, to stand all alone bravely in the cold and wind. Only some of their sisters and brothers could overpopulate her rapidly ongoing story from time to time. Maybe these guys would seem relevant.

In a book store, let any stingy yet reading consumer just flip through all the pages and sometimes stall